Back that thing up
Over the past 17 or so years of owning computers I never put much thought into a serious data backup strategy. I figured the likelihood of my disks crashing were pretty low, so why bother? Several crashed drives and a stolen laptop later (I don’t learn good) I decided to invest in an external drive to back up my data using Time Machine. Now this was sufficient until Carter was born, then I started taking a ridiculous amount of 21 megapixel baby pictures & HD videos and now my drive space is tapped out. If either of my drives were to crash I’d be pretty much screwed and I’d lose pretty much the first 7 months of Carter’s life. Not good.
Being the research hound that I am, I literally spent days trying to figure out what to do until I found the perfect solution. Enter the Drobo. The Drobo is a 4 bay backup “robot” that automatically backs up all of your data, you just pop in the empty 3.5″ drives of your choice (size, brand and speed don’t matter, the Drobo handles the details) and it automatically starts the backup process. What I like about it is the fact that it has 4 bays, so I can use one drive to back up my laptop using Time Machine (hooking up the Drobo to my Airport Extreme Base Station), then another drive to mirror the Time Machine backup just in case my laptop drive and the first Drobo backup happen to fail at the same time. Not likely, but Murphy’s Law tends to apply with these physical drives. Then with the 3rd slot, I can use this drive to house all of my large media that I don’t want clogging up my laptop drive, and the 4th drive can be set up as a mirror to automatically back up drive 3.
So the Drobo pretty much has me fully covered in case of serious catastrophic multiple drive failure, protecting my data for Carter to one day be able to see every single raw image and second of HD video that I’ve taken of him since birth. Also, the drives are hot-swappable so if any of them fails I can just swap out the crashed disk with a new one and it will auto-heal and repair itself without any downtime. Hopefully it works as advertised, I will post a follow up on my thoughts after I get the thing up and running.
